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Distribution In Poland, who you know determines how well you do. The trick is making friends with resellers who don’t just pop up, take your product and then vanish with your zlotys

Even though Lech Walesa has returned to the shipyard and former communists run Poland, the economy of Central Europe’s most populous nation is still growing 8 percent per year. There are plenty of zlotys to go around. So for midsize PC hardware and software makers, Poland is a market to drool over.

It’s no cinch, though. Opening a sales office is a major investment and selling through distributors can cost even more in risk. The problem: Although the majority of the country’s 250 computer companies are resellers of some stripe, these local outfits tend to pop up, peddle your product and …

Got some documents to deliver? Why not code them into HTML and let ’em rip over the Net? It’s a cheap and easy solution that could put those big, proprietary document management systems out of business in no time, right?

Well, no. If your documents consist of a five-page employee handbook and an official list of company holidays, you’ll probably be able to make do posting the materials on your company’s intranet. But as companies of all sizes are discovering, if you need to capture, store, index, review, revise, locate, retrieve and protect strategic documents, a full-fledged document management system is still the way to go.

That doesn’t mean there’s not a place for the Internet or intranets in document management. In fact, the combination of a World Wide Web browser front end …

It’s Europe’s dirty little secret: A wicked financing shortage threatens to put dozens of computer distributors out of business. Nobody likes to talk about it. But everybody’s worried. Even vendors. If too many distributors are killed off, prices will go up, demand may slacken and second-tier vendors could lose access to European markets.

Scant profits are the main culprit. Many European distributors operate on razor-thin margins of 1 percent to 2 percent. That’s not enough cash to cover the gap between when they pay their suppliers and when they get paid by resellers. The result: These formerly credit-worthy outfits are being shunned by the banks. And it’s not just happening in Eastern Europe. Even distributors in stalwart markets such as Germany and France are suffering.

Behind every new-drug submission filed to the Food and Drug Administration lies a mountain of information. Each pharmaceutical submission is backed up by binder after binder of technical reports that detail untold volumes of lab experiments and other information required by federal regulations. Drug giant Eli Lilly and Co. was desperate for a way to combat the paper glut.

The first attempt was made in 1994, with Lilly implementing Documentum Inc.’s expensive and sophisticated Documentum Enterprise Document Management System. But with per-seat licenses for Documentum priced at about $1,000, only 500 of Lilly’s 26,000 worldwide employees had access to the system. Although Documentum solved heavy-duty problems for the product development staff, there had to be a better way to share its benefits with the wider staff, without the hefty price tag.